Family Albums: Photographs of the African Diaspora is a counter-narrative to its monument home, built to glorify the nation’s former empire
Its thousands of images hail from around the world, capturing an empire that spanned from Angola to Cape Verde and beyond. For historian Filipa Vicente, however, 10 years of combing through the colonial archive at the University of Lisbon proved deeply unsettling; revealing people who were often nameless and were probably photographed without consent.
“These are violent visual archives,” said Vicente, a researcher at the university. So last year she began dreaming up a response, inviting Portuguese families of African descent to rummage through their drawers and phones to put together their own photo archive.
